Ephemeral OS Disk in limited preview

Today we are delighted to share the limited preview of Ephemeral OS Disk, a new virtual machine (VM) and virtual machine scale set (VMSS) feature that allows you to create an OS disk directly on the host node, providing local disk performance and faster VM/VMSS reimage time.

This offering is based on your feedback to provide a lower cost OS disk able to deliver higher performance for stateless applications that require consistent, low read/write latency to OS disk, as well as frequent reimage operations to reset the VM(s) to the original state. This includes workloads such as website applications, game server hosting services, VM pools, computation jobs and more. Ephemeral OS Disks also work well for workloads that are leveraging low-priority VM scale sets.

OS disk data is stored to local host machine and is not persisted to Azure Storage

Stop-deallocated state

VMSS instances and VMs can be stop-deallocated and restarted from the stop-deallocated state

VMSS instances and VMs cannot be stop-deallocated

OS disk resize

Supported during VM creation and after VM is stop-deallocated

Supported during VM creation only

Resizing to a new VM size

OS disk data is preserved

OS disk data is deleted, OS is re-provisioned

How to join preview

To enroll in the limited public preview, you will need to submit this form and your subscription will be approved within 24 to 48 hours starting October 10, 2018. You can check the status of your request by running the following PowerShell command: